A teenage girls diary from 1975 to 1976 revealing bad decisions, first love, heartbreat, rivalry and unexpected peril.

A story about an 18 year young teen girl in the 70's, making life decisions, growing up, learning important lessons and dealing with heartbreak. She falls into the Disco and Punk scene, but still clings to her earthy love of hiking and backpacking. There are boyfriends who constantly let her down, but her Springer Spaniel, Rex, teaches her the importance of loyalty and trust. Finally, after many disappointments, a backpacking trip into the Grand Canyon, reveals to her a different view on life. She is finally able to accept her life in contentment.

East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte, is an edited collection of thirty-one essays that trace the experience of a California community over three centuries, from eighteenth-century Spanish colonization to twenty-first century globalization. Employing traditional historical scholarship, oral history, creative nonfiction and original art, the book provides a radical new history of El Monte and South El Monte, showing how interdisciplinary and community-engaged scholarship can break new ground in public history. East of East tells stories that have been excluded from dominant historical narratives—stories that long survived only in the popular memory of residents, as well as narratives that have been almost completely buried and all but forgotten. Its cast of characters includes white vigilantes, Mexican anarchists, Japanese farmers, labor organizers, civil rights pioneers, and punk rockers, as well as the ordinary and unnamed youth who generated a vibrant local culture at dances and dive bars.

'Gripping and atmospheric' - Sunday Times A breath-taking missing persons thriller set under the menacing peaks of the Pyrenees Five years after their disappearance, the village of Monteperdido still mourns the loss of Ana and Lucia, two eleven-year-old friends who left school one afternoon and were never seen again. Now, Ana reappears unexpectedly inside a crashed car, wounded but alive. The case reopens and a race against time begins to discover who was behind the girls' kidnapping. Most importantly, where is Lucia and is she still alive? Inspector Sara Campos and her boss Santiago Bain, from Madrid's head office, are forced to work with the local police. Five years ago fatal mistakes were made in the investigation conducted after the girls first vanished, and this mustn't happen again. But Monteperdido has rules of its own. 'Addictive, atmospheric and haunting, one of the best books you'll read this year' - Jo Spain, internationally bestselling author of The Confession

Teenager Marlene Vaughan’s mother Gertrude was murdered in 1953. They lived in Baldwin Park, in the central San Gabriel Valley of Los Angeles County. Gertrude was abducted from a bar in El Monte and found dead in Azusa. The case was never solved. Four years later, Marlene obtains a lead on the killers, learning that they have returned to Los Angeles. She reconnects with her old friend Robby, and asks him to help her solve the crime because “he’s the smartest boy she ever knew.” Robby recruits a team to work on the crime, including his stepmother, Clara, and his youngest uncle, Melvin. They form a picture of two itinerant salesmen who periodically visit L.A. and frequent the Silver Dollar Saloon in El Monte, where Gertrude disappeared. The amateur detectives put the clues together and suspect that there are two killers, both World War II veterans, one with anger issues caused by a war injury, and the other a passive sidekick. This complex murder mystery is a sequel to the author’s book Life Could Be a Dream, and provides an intimate glimpse into life in Southern California in the 1950s.

"Pate McMichael not only puts to rest the legend of a conspiracy to kill Martin Luther King Jr. but, in lucid, compelling prose, he also demonstrates how that legend was constructed, and why it persists. Anyone interested in civil rights history, the 1960s, King, or conspiracy theories—or just a great story—should grab this book and hold on tight." —Clay Risen, author of The Bill of the Century Unanswered questions surround the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and many still wonder whether justice was served. After all, only one man, an escaped convict named James Earl Ray, was punished for the crime, and he did not seem to fit the caricature of a hangdog racist thirsty for blood. Had he been paid by clandestine forces? After his arrest, Ray forged a partnership with two very strange bedfellows: a slick lawyer named Arthur J. Hanes, the de facto "Klonsel" for the United Klans of America, and journalist William Bradford Huie, the darling of Look magazine. Despite polar opposite views on race, Hanes and Huie found common cause in the world of conspiracy. Together, they thought they could make Memphis the new Dallas. Relying on a trove of newly released documents and dusty files, Klandestine takes readers deep inside Ray's Memphis jail cell and Alabama's violent Klaverns, showing how a legacy of unpunished racial killings provided the perfect exigency to sell a lucrative conspiracy to a suspicious and outraged nation. Pate McMichael is an award-winning journalist. His stories have been published in Zócalo Public Square, Atlanta magazine, St. Louis magazine, and elsewhere.